Will County
The largest inland port in North America is here
The CenterPoint Intermodal Center at Elwood is reported as the largest inland port in North America, handling over 750,000 container lifts a year, with the intermodal yards processing about 3 million TEUs annually. It was built on part of the former Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, decommissioned in 1976.
The complex spans more than 6,400 acres — a 785-acre Union Pacific complex south of Joliet and a 770-acre BNSF complex to the southwest. Logistics Park Chicago, the BNSF half, lies 2.66 miles from the Elwood city centroid and is reported to hold 34 overhead cranes and 79,000 feet of production track. It opened in August 2002.
Sources: city-pages node-list and commercial reporting, checked 2026-08-24.
Six thousand wheeled spots is a count of road equipment
That last set of figures is worth reading carefully, because one of them is a truck number rather than a rail number. Logistics Park Chicago is reported to hold 6,000 wheeled parking spots and 12,500 on-site stacking positions.
A wheeled spot holds a container on a chassis — that is, on road running gear. So the wheeled figure is a published measure of how much road equipment the terminal is built to hold at once, which is a rare thing to be able to say about any facility. Both BNSF Railway and Union Pacific run intermodal terminals in the complex, and drayage between them and the warehouses around Will County is the work.
Drayage is short, loaded and relentless — gate, road, gate again. The hour meter is the honest record of it.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and chassis tractors dominate around a 6,400-acre complex in Will County. That is a fact about Logistics Park Chicago and its Union Pacific neighbour, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, dump trucks, work trucks and pickups are all here too, and the offer is made the same way on any of them.
Most of the reasons people sell aren’t happy ones, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is fine.
Illinois law
What the state lets a truck carry
Those loads all run under one set of numbers. Illinois statute 625 ILCS 5/15-111 sets 80,000 pounds gross for five or more axles, 20,000 pounds on a single axle and 34,000 pounds on a tandem, with no axle inside that tandem over 20,000 pounds, and a formula for consecutive axle groups that varies with spacing.
Local authorities and cities over 50,000 people may set their own weight limits by ordinance, but the same statute stops them exceeding the state maximums. So an Illinois local limit can only ever be lower than the state figure, never higher — which is worth knowing before you plan a route on the state number alone.
That section carries no seasonal frost provisions and no harvest or agricultural exemptions. That is scoped to that section of the statute and is not a claim that Illinois has no seasonal restriction anywhere, which we did not check.
One more number from the same code decides whether a title gets branded. Under 625 ILCS 5/3-117.1(b)(1) a vehicle is salvage once an insurance company pays a total loss claim on it, with two carve-outs: hail damage alone, where it does not affect operational safety, and any vehicle nine model years of age or older, which the registered owner may keep by agreement with the insurer. That second one is a right to ask rather than something the law does on its own. Subsection (b)(1.1) sets a separate test for self-insured companies — salvage where the repair cost, labour included, would come to more than 70% of what the vehicle was worth undamaged.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. Checked 2026-08-23.
Questions we get asked
- Does it have to run?No. We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it — but a truck that doesn’t start and is otherwise all there is fine. A missing bumper is fine.
- What about the title?We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If yours is lost, a replacement is an $18 counter transaction. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside Logistics Park Chicago, 2.66 miles from the centroid or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Will County, and in Channahon, Symerton and Joliet as well — getting to you is our problem, not yours.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.